December 4, 2008 • 17 mins
You've heard of guerrilla fighting tactics, but how much do you know about guerrilla gardening? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about this "revolutionary" gardening trend.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know?
From House Stuffworks dot Com? Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh. Chuck's with me. Say hi, Chuck, Hi, and
I know it titillates Chuck when I say this, So,
welcome to Stuff you should Know. I love it. Ye
(00:22):
sixty episodes in and we're introducing the show as the show.
Yeah yeah, well you know you got the training things.
Sometimes I like it. Yeah, pretty pretty soon I'll just
start making up new names for it. Will be like, wait,
did I down a little the right one? Yeah? Um, so,
Chuck as uh as I am usually want to do.
I have an anecdote from my past that will nicely
segue into what we should tell what we should talk
(00:44):
about today. I like these because they always I don't
know about these beforehand, I really don't, so they're always interesting.
This one's not, you know, by comparison, it's not that good,
So don't get your hopes. Okay, but um, you know,
when I was a slightly younger man in my early teens,
I had a friend, um named Jeremy, whose dad was
a firefighter, and here was this tough guy, but he, um,
he also was fairly cultivated, you know, cultured um and uh,
(01:09):
he and his friends, some of them firefighter buddies, used
to go out at night and engage in what they
called clumping all right now, and I've never heard of
it before or since. I think they made it up actually, um,
but clumping involved going into somebody's yard and stealing plants
that you liked and then taking them back to your
yard and planning them there. Um a firefighter to do
(01:34):
anything exactly. Yeah, well, you know, if he's saving lives,
I think he can kind of get something of a past.
But it always struck me as a little um wrong.
Maybe it is stealing quite clearly, um. But but at
the same time, it's like it's even more than stealing,
you know. It's it's not like stealing somebody's cell phone.
(01:54):
You don't have anything really attached that except you know,
maybe your your your phone book in it. This is,
you know, somebody is cultivating a garden. Somebody's taking the
time to to plan this and intend to it, and
now all of a sudden there's huge holes filled with
stealing their time. You're stealing their or their money that
they put into the planting. Sure now comes to the segue.
You want to know what the opposite of that is.
(02:16):
I have a good feeling guerrilla gardening. That's precisely right.
And and chuck, Now, I know there has been um
some discrepancy in the very recent past. We're talking uh
the guerrilla as in like guerrilla warfare, right right, not
the apes gardening girllas. Aren't apes, are they? I can
(02:37):
never remember. I don't know, I know the primates. Let's
go with that, okay. Um, so yeah, we're talking guerrilla gardening.
And it is pretty much what it sounds like. It's
you know, making stealth maneuvers into uh usually untended areas
or neglected or overgrown vacant lots, that that kind of thing,
and you know, tilling the soil, weed it and planning
(03:01):
new stuff. Yeah. I think this is really really cool.
I do too, because it's subversive, which you know, I'm
I'm very hit to, like you know, the smart mobs thing, right. Um,
but it doesn't harm anyone, doesn't harm anyone, know, as
a matter of fact, that makes the the world or
the city or wherever you live. And you're doing this
(03:21):
a much better place, although some people still try and
shut it down, which we'll get to later. Yeah, good,
because I got a great line for that. Yeah. So, um,
you want to give a little background, a little history
on guerilla gardening. Yeah, sure. Originally I believe it started
in New York City in the early seventies, the modern
the modern version did, yes, right, Do you have info
(03:42):
on the ancient version? Apparently it goes back to sixty
nine when a guy named Gerard Winston Lee I believe
he's from Surrey, England. He started a group called the
Diggers and they were basically the first guerilla gardeners. They
just went into places that they didn't own, plots of
land they didn't known, and started planting. I wonder if
(04:03):
they were planting crops. Actually they were planning vegetables. Yeah. Well,
the modern version started in the early seventies in New
York and there was a resident there named Liz Christie,
and she founded the Green Guerrillas and they started hitting
up local lots and planting flowers. And the first one,
I believe was at the corner of a bower which
(04:25):
I know well. And did you know Bowery is actually
Dutch for farm. Really. Yeah, maybe that's why they picked it.
I found it on the the Green Gorilla's website. Cool. Yeah,
so they Christie and the Green Gorillas. Um actually kind
of had a hard fought struggle at first, that that
place at the corner of Bowery in Houston that had
little housing, sorry, that little neglected park that no one
(04:50):
cared about. All of a sudden, now that they're tending
to it and planning stuff. They had they had a
fight on their hands with with the city. I believe.
I didn't realize that. Actually, yeah, they had. They had
some thing of a struggle, and um, finally the city,
the city gave in, saw the error of its ways
after about a year and legitimized it and it became
this community garden. Now it's a memorial park dedicated to
(05:11):
Liz Christie. Very cool in New York. I have to
go by. But she was the one who originated seed bombs. Yeah,
these are really cool, and originally she was she was
using um condoms filled with tomato seeds or some some
kind of seeds and like compost and then you know,
hurling them into a vacant lot or something like interesting
and the condom would disintegrate. No, no, no, so they
(05:33):
didn't work. I mean it worked. I think the water
would get get into it or something like that, or
maybe she slid it. But even after the stuff planted,
you still have a prophylactic um laying around, which really
bacons up a lot. You know. Have you been to
New York City though I have, but not since I
was young. Yeah, the condom on the street isn't the
strangest thing right now, I've seen quite a few. But
(05:54):
there are greener ways to do it, right, Yeah. I
think nowadays the seed bomb is evolved into a clay
mixture with like some clay and compost and seed and
water and you just form into a little ball and
you can just literally you can toss these from your car.
And it has to be something obviously that can can
grow from not having to dig and plant it into
(06:15):
the ground. But yeah, it's a seed bomb. Pretty cool. Yeah,
And apparently what like they they're dried out and then
when it rains, the thing kind of reconstitutes or dissolves,
and then the seeds are spread and there's this compost
that that feeds it. Right, Ideally, I think the seed
bombs are done either in the rain or before it rains,
right before it rains. That's very cool. Yeah. And and
(06:37):
like you said, you can throw them from a moving car,
you know, just kind of drive around and you're just
you know, guerrilla gardening, guerrilla gardening, spreading beauty. Yeah, exactly.
And I saw a cool video on the Guardians website
of a guy named Richard Reynolds. Yeah, did you see
him making seed bombs? Yeah, there's there's a great how
to video if if any of you guys out there
(06:58):
in podcast land or interest it in making your own
seed bombs, there's a great how to step by step
video um with Richard Reynolds. And you're absolutely right, he
is a cool dude. He's a very cool dude. Um.
While we're on Richard, he's he was the founder of
the London grilla guardening movement from what I understand, and
has a great website Gorilla Guardening dot org. Yeah, it's
(07:18):
pretty much like the definitive guerrilla gardening website. I know,
in a Google search of the typing guerilla gardening, it's
definitely the first one that comes up, which is because
seems the most legitimate as well. Yeah, um, he actually
I read a cool thing on his website today where
he um had been taken care of. It may have
been his own apartment complex. It was the Horse and
Elephant or the Buggy and something around right. I love
(07:39):
the names for the pretty cool. It's very cool. So yeah,
he was had been taking care of his own garden
there and eventually got um. The residents had been paying
uh money towards maintenance, lawn maintenance, and basically the residents
started to say, hey, this is kind of fraudulent. This
guy has been doing this free. We're paying money for nothing.
(08:02):
And he actually got refunded. Uh. The ninety residents he
had their money refunded for like a three year period
was about a hundred pounds, and every everything was going swimmingly.
After that, he had um some sort of at least
verbal consensus between the paid groundkeepers, the building's owners, and
himself that he would take care of this this area,
(08:25):
this common area. And he's doing a heck of a job.
The guy has you know, he's he's a great gardener
to begin with. UM. But as long as he gave
the management a month a month's notice that he was
going to stop so they could get that company back
in there to do their you know, terrible job of
taking care of it. So he's got this agreement and
(08:47):
then all of a sudden things just go sideways and
he's got problems again. And the one problem, you know,
it's it's mind boggling to me. If you have a
vacant lot, if you have a common area, if there's
a place where, um, it's just being neglected, and then
somebody very uh, very benevolently just starts taking care of it,
(09:08):
plant it. What's the problem. But the problem is is
there is guerrilla gardening also kind of inadvertently serves as
a slap in the face to people who are very
interested in rules and procedure and you know, like they're
County Cordon code Enforcement's phone number by heart, and that's
all you have to do. It's called code enforcement. And
(09:28):
all of a sudden, this this great act is now criminal,
which it wasn't the first place, but everybody kind of
looks the other way, right. Did you see the video
on his site where they got shut down? No? I
didn't see them. Yeah, it's on YouTube as well, and
it's on his website. And they were actually tending to
a an area underneath a street sign I believe in
London on a corner and uh at night, usually it's
(09:51):
gardening at night. Uh. Thanks to r M, we can
give them a little shout out and they do this
undercover the night quite often. And the cops came by
and they shut him down. It's all on tape and
he gets into a little minor argument with them that
they're beautifying the area and the cops uh. And of
course these are cops in London, so it's all very polite.
You know. In the United States, that would go down
(10:12):
much differently. And eventually they you know, they actually left
because they threatened to arrest them and um, but they
snuck back a couple of hours later and finish the
job for them. Yeah. And and yes, I noticed there's
like clips and and um photo documentaries of like him
all over the world doing like guerrilla gardening. Yeah, and
it is all over the world. I saw that there
were sites in German and Australia, and here in the
(10:34):
United States are a lot of groups. And like you
were pointing out, we don't or I pointed out, we
don't have one here in Atlanta. Um. But you mentioned
that you don't necessarily have to have a group, an
organized group that does this in a website. You can
you can do it on your own. Yeah, I mean,
it doesn't get much more low tech than than seed bombs,
you know. And you could, like you said, just drive around,
throw them out the window, see what happens. But yeah,
(10:56):
you could go so far as to organize a group
right well, which is kind of the cool thing I think. Um,
it goes a little bit beyond just the gardening and beautification.
A lot of times, it's bringing the community together in
a cool way, just like when you there's groups that
go around and pick up trash that kind of thing. Yeah. Now, um,
I know on reynolds site there's something called troop digs.
(11:16):
I think it's like the forum you can go and
find out who's digging in your area right where they're
going to be that kind of thing, or who you
need to contact. Um and and some people from what
I've read about reynalds, he uh is completely into beautification.
That his only motive. But there's there's also a very
political aspect to it. To grilla gardening. Um, it's all
(11:39):
it can be a form of protest of you know, capitalism,
of of urban blight. That that kind of thing, the
city won't take care of itself, so we will, right exactly. Um.
And also of like food costs, that can be a
protest of that, right. Um. And actually there's this guy
in I believe Boulder, Colorado this past summer's name was
(12:01):
Scott Hoffenburg, and he got slept with the two thousand
dollar a day fine for guerrilla gardening. Really, and the
reason he was doing it, he said, was because food
prices had gotten out of hand. So he in a
neighbor took up this little right away, you know, the
little strips in between the sidewalk in the street. They
just planted a bunch of cucumbers and tomatoes and squash
(12:21):
and all this kind of thing. And um that some
some one of those people with rules and procedures, you know,
called the co enforcement. So luckily the county said they're
going to try to work with the guy. And I
never I didn't hear what happened, but I have a
feeling that if you're a guerrilla gardener and you're gardening
actually right out front of your house and they're threatening
(12:44):
a two thousand dollar fine, that would probably go a
long way to get you to comply. With those rules
and procedures. Yeah, you know, I'd like to pick someone's brain.
He was really against us. Yeah, I want to meet
the person who sees what's going on and goes home
and it's just, yeah, dare they plant those flowers right there? Yeah?
I'm just I'm curious, what's what's happening there? Yeah, And
I don't think I could explain it. But I know
(13:04):
for a fact that I've met people like that before.
It's always a little unsettling. These are probably the same
people that are the neighborhood associations that just flip out
when someone's mailbox looks different than the rest. And yeah,
those those people are a lot of fun. I used
to have a friend who lived in my subdivision. His
family routinely got um letters from the neighborhood association to
you know, move the water skis out from in front
(13:25):
of the garage and that kind of thing. It's crazy.
It was weird. Um so but okay, so Chuck. Both
of us have expressed an interest in guerilla gardening. Let's
say somebody who's listening to us, you know, wants to
get started. Not everybody's against this. And actually, from what
I understand. Um, local nurseries have a tendency to really
kind of support this kind of thing. Yeah, they have
(13:48):
dead plants nobody's gonna buy anyway that may or may
not come back to life. Why not? So what what
should what should people look for when they're doing this?
But I just want to point out this very nice
imperson impersonation but have tol you just like to help me? Yeah,
I wish people could have seen that. Um. Well, first
thing you want to do is find out, you know,
identify your location of where you want to do this.
So look for, like you said, sometimes the little strips
(14:11):
of land between the street and the sidewalk that are
full of trash or grown over with weeds. Those are
good spots corners that have those. And then you want to,
uh find out what kind of plants you want. Uh,
indigenous species are good, non invasive, non invasive. You don't
want to like plant the new cud zoo or anything. Right,
which for you non Southerners is a very fast growing
(14:32):
week just that just takes over absolutely everything. Right, It
can kill an eight foot oak tree in a year
or two, right, Thank you Japan for that exactly. Uh. So, yeah,
you want to pick out the right plants, and you also,
I mean you're you're gonna be It's not like you
just plant this and then you just leave forever. I mean,
if you really want to do it right, you want
to upkeep it. So if you don't have a ton
of time, you want to pick some plants that require
(14:54):
as little upkeep as possible. Yeah, like drought resistant plants,
because the law of comments everybody he wants to take
as much out of this common pool and put as
little back as possible, well as far as economists would say.
Um so yeah, so if you have drought resistant plants,
you can, you know, leave it up to the universe
to take care of it. I hate that ad I know.
(15:15):
Uh so, uh yeah, you've got your plants, you've eat.
When you need to get your plants, you can ask
for donations, or you can buy him yourself if you've
got a extra cash, gather up a little team, or
if you just want to do it yourself, if it's
doable by yourself, and then you know, you go out.
A lot of people do it at night. Um here
in Atlanta, I think in my neighborhood, I could go
out in the middle of the day and no one
would do totally no same here, I think as well,
(15:37):
and there's plenty of lots around my house that I
could get to experise it. Let's do that. Well, maybe
we should, all right, and if any of you out
there interested in getting into guerrilla gardening, uh, we would
suggest checking out guerrilla Gardening dot org Richard Renald site.
He also has a book um based on the advice
of Chairman Mao and Shay Gavara, but about guerrilla gardening
(15:59):
in a of course, you would also be interested in
visiting our humble website. You can type in guerrilla gardening
in the search bar and how Stuff Works dot com
and Chuck, what do you have for us? Do we
have any listener mail? Yep, we have some listener mail.
Listener mail time. So this letter, Josh comes to us
from a lady named Leah Johnson, and uh, Leah says,
(16:22):
I liked your how Echo Anxiety Works article, and I
also liked how you mentioned the vulture vomit at the end. Oh, yes,
this is a good letter. I have, in fact been
puked on by a Turkey vulture and it was disgusting.
I was part of a raptor rehabilitation program, and we
had outdoor housing for them, which we cleaned out once
a week. Every time I went to get the turkey
vulture out so we could clean it out, or just
(16:43):
to give him some time outside, he'd panic and puke
all over the over the place, including on me. Unfortunately,
I always had on gloves when handling the bird, so
the acidity wasn't so much a problem as a terrible
smell from the bird of prey diet we were feeding him. Anyway.
Thanks for making my days better if I give me
something interesting to listen to, and YadA, YadA, YadA, we
love you. That's great. Well, Leah, because you send in
(17:07):
your listener email and uh, because of your selfless care
of birds of prey, we're gonna send you our set
of how stuff Work steak knives are you and yours?
We hope you enjoy them. And if anything else anyone
else out there wants to send us an email, you
can send it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works
(17:27):
dot com. Send it for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com.
H brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know?
From House Stuffworks dot Com? Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh. Chuck's with me. Say hi, Chuck, Hi, and
I know it titillates Chuck when I say this, So,
welcome to Stuff you should Know. I love it. Ye
(00:22):
sixty episodes in and we're introducing the show as the show.
Yeah yeah, well you know you got the training things.
Sometimes I like it. Yeah, pretty pretty soon I'll just
start making up new names for it. Will be like, wait,
did I down a little the right one? Yeah? Um, so,
Chuck as uh as I am usually want to do.
I have an anecdote from my past that will nicely
segue into what we should tell what we should talk
(00:44):
about today. I like these because they always I don't
know about these beforehand, I really don't, so they're always interesting.
This one's not, you know, by comparison, it's not that good,
So don't get your hopes. Okay, but um, you know,
when I was a slightly younger man in my early teens,
I had a friend, um named Jeremy, whose dad was
a firefighter, and here was this tough guy, but he, um,
he also was fairly cultivated, you know, cultured um and uh,
(01:09):
he and his friends, some of them firefighter buddies, used
to go out at night and engage in what they
called clumping all right now, and I've never heard of
it before or since. I think they made it up actually, um,
but clumping involved going into somebody's yard and stealing plants
that you liked and then taking them back to your
yard and planning them there. Um a firefighter to do
(01:34):
anything exactly. Yeah, well, you know, if he's saving lives,
I think he can kind of get something of a past.
But it always struck me as a little um wrong.
Maybe it is stealing quite clearly, um. But but at
the same time, it's like it's even more than stealing,
you know. It's it's not like stealing somebody's cell phone.
(01:54):
You don't have anything really attached that except you know,
maybe your your your phone book in it. This is,
you know, somebody is cultivating a garden. Somebody's taking the
time to to plan this and intend to it, and
now all of a sudden there's huge holes filled with
stealing their time. You're stealing their or their money that
they put into the planting. Sure now comes to the segue.
You want to know what the opposite of that is.
(02:16):
I have a good feeling guerrilla gardening. That's precisely right.
And and chuck, Now, I know there has been um
some discrepancy in the very recent past. We're talking uh
the guerrilla as in like guerrilla warfare, right right, not
the apes gardening girllas. Aren't apes, are they? I can
(02:37):
never remember. I don't know, I know the primates. Let's
go with that, okay. Um, so yeah, we're talking guerrilla gardening.
And it is pretty much what it sounds like. It's
you know, making stealth maneuvers into uh usually untended areas
or neglected or overgrown vacant lots, that that kind of thing,
and you know, tilling the soil, weed it and planning
(03:01):
new stuff. Yeah. I think this is really really cool.
I do too, because it's subversive, which you know, I'm
I'm very hit to, like you know, the smart mobs thing, right. Um,
but it doesn't harm anyone, doesn't harm anyone, know, as
a matter of fact, that makes the the world or
the city or wherever you live. And you're doing this
(03:21):
a much better place, although some people still try and
shut it down, which we'll get to later. Yeah, good,
because I got a great line for that. Yeah. So, um,
you want to give a little background, a little history
on guerilla gardening. Yeah, sure. Originally I believe it started
in New York City in the early seventies, the modern
the modern version did, yes, right, Do you have info
(03:42):
on the ancient version? Apparently it goes back to sixty
nine when a guy named Gerard Winston Lee I believe
he's from Surrey, England. He started a group called the
Diggers and they were basically the first guerilla gardeners. They
just went into places that they didn't own, plots of
land they didn't known, and started planting. I wonder if
(04:03):
they were planting crops. Actually they were planning vegetables. Yeah. Well,
the modern version started in the early seventies in New
York and there was a resident there named Liz Christie,
and she founded the Green Guerrillas and they started hitting
up local lots and planting flowers. And the first one,
I believe was at the corner of a bower which
(04:25):
I know well. And did you know Bowery is actually
Dutch for farm. Really. Yeah, maybe that's why they picked it.
I found it on the the Green Gorilla's website. Cool. Yeah,
so they Christie and the Green Gorillas. Um actually kind
of had a hard fought struggle at first, that that
place at the corner of Bowery in Houston that had
little housing, sorry, that little neglected park that no one
(04:50):
cared about. All of a sudden, now that they're tending
to it and planning stuff. They had they had a
fight on their hands with with the city. I believe.
I didn't realize that. Actually, yeah, they had. They had
some thing of a struggle, and um, finally the city,
the city gave in, saw the error of its ways
after about a year and legitimized it and it became
this community garden. Now it's a memorial park dedicated to
(05:11):
Liz Christie. Very cool in New York. I have to
go by. But she was the one who originated seed bombs. Yeah,
these are really cool, and originally she was she was
using um condoms filled with tomato seeds or some some
kind of seeds and like compost and then you know,
hurling them into a vacant lot or something like interesting
and the condom would disintegrate. No, no, no, so they
(05:33):
didn't work. I mean it worked. I think the water
would get get into it or something like that, or
maybe she slid it. But even after the stuff planted,
you still have a prophylactic um laying around, which really
bacons up a lot. You know. Have you been to
New York City though I have, but not since I
was young. Yeah, the condom on the street isn't the
strangest thing right now, I've seen quite a few. But
(05:54):
there are greener ways to do it, right, Yeah. I
think nowadays the seed bomb is evolved into a clay
mixture with like some clay and compost and seed and
water and you just form into a little ball and
you can just literally you can toss these from your car.
And it has to be something obviously that can can
grow from not having to dig and plant it into
(06:15):
the ground. But yeah, it's a seed bomb. Pretty cool. Yeah,
And apparently what like they they're dried out and then
when it rains, the thing kind of reconstitutes or dissolves,
and then the seeds are spread and there's this compost
that that feeds it. Right, Ideally, I think the seed
bombs are done either in the rain or before it rains,
right before it rains. That's very cool. Yeah. And and
(06:37):
like you said, you can throw them from a moving car,
you know, just kind of drive around and you're just
you know, guerrilla gardening, guerrilla gardening, spreading beauty. Yeah, exactly.
And I saw a cool video on the Guardians website
of a guy named Richard Reynolds. Yeah, did you see
him making seed bombs? Yeah, there's there's a great how
to video if if any of you guys out there
(06:58):
in podcast land or interest it in making your own
seed bombs, there's a great how to step by step
video um with Richard Reynolds. And you're absolutely right, he
is a cool dude. He's a very cool dude. Um.
While we're on Richard, he's he was the founder of
the London grilla guardening movement from what I understand, and
has a great website Gorilla Guardening dot org. Yeah, it's
(07:18):
pretty much like the definitive guerrilla gardening website. I know,
in a Google search of the typing guerilla gardening, it's
definitely the first one that comes up, which is because
seems the most legitimate as well. Yeah, um, he actually
I read a cool thing on his website today where
he um had been taken care of. It may have
been his own apartment complex. It was the Horse and
Elephant or the Buggy and something around right. I love
(07:39):
the names for the pretty cool. It's very cool. So yeah,
he was had been taking care of his own garden
there and eventually got um. The residents had been paying
uh money towards maintenance, lawn maintenance, and basically the residents
started to say, hey, this is kind of fraudulent. This
guy has been doing this free. We're paying money for nothing.
(08:02):
And he actually got refunded. Uh. The ninety residents he
had their money refunded for like a three year period
was about a hundred pounds, and every everything was going swimmingly.
After that, he had um some sort of at least
verbal consensus between the paid groundkeepers, the building's owners, and
himself that he would take care of this this area,
(08:25):
this common area. And he's doing a heck of a job.
The guy has you know, he's he's a great gardener
to begin with. UM. But as long as he gave
the management a month a month's notice that he was
going to stop so they could get that company back
in there to do their you know, terrible job of
taking care of it. So he's got this agreement and
(08:47):
then all of a sudden things just go sideways and
he's got problems again. And the one problem, you know,
it's it's mind boggling to me. If you have a
vacant lot, if you have a common area, if there's
a place where, um, it's just being neglected, and then
somebody very uh, very benevolently just starts taking care of it,
(09:08):
plant it. What's the problem. But the problem is is
there is guerrilla gardening also kind of inadvertently serves as
a slap in the face to people who are very
interested in rules and procedure and you know, like they're
County Cordon code Enforcement's phone number by heart, and that's
all you have to do. It's called code enforcement. And
(09:28):
all of a sudden, this this great act is now criminal,
which it wasn't the first place, but everybody kind of
looks the other way, right. Did you see the video
on his site where they got shut down? No? I
didn't see them. Yeah, it's on YouTube as well, and
it's on his website. And they were actually tending to
a an area underneath a street sign I believe in
London on a corner and uh at night, usually it's
(09:51):
gardening at night. Uh. Thanks to r M, we can
give them a little shout out and they do this
undercover the night quite often. And the cops came by
and they shut him down. It's all on tape and
he gets into a little minor argument with them that
they're beautifying the area and the cops uh. And of
course these are cops in London, so it's all very polite.
You know. In the United States, that would go down
(10:12):
much differently. And eventually they you know, they actually left
because they threatened to arrest them and um, but they
snuck back a couple of hours later and finish the
job for them. Yeah. And and yes, I noticed there's
like clips and and um photo documentaries of like him
all over the world doing like guerrilla gardening. Yeah, and
it is all over the world. I saw that there
were sites in German and Australia, and here in the
(10:34):
United States are a lot of groups. And like you
were pointing out, we don't or I pointed out, we
don't have one here in Atlanta. Um. But you mentioned
that you don't necessarily have to have a group, an
organized group that does this in a website. You can
you can do it on your own. Yeah, I mean,
it doesn't get much more low tech than than seed bombs,
you know. And you could, like you said, just drive around,
throw them out the window, see what happens. But yeah,
(10:56):
you could go so far as to organize a group
right well, which is kind of the cool thing I think. Um,
it goes a little bit beyond just the gardening and beautification.
A lot of times, it's bringing the community together in
a cool way, just like when you there's groups that
go around and pick up trash that kind of thing. Yeah. Now, um,
I know on reynolds site there's something called troop digs.
(11:16):
I think it's like the forum you can go and
find out who's digging in your area right where they're
going to be that kind of thing, or who you
need to contact. Um and and some people from what
I've read about reynalds, he uh is completely into beautification.
That his only motive. But there's there's also a very
political aspect to it. To grilla gardening. Um, it's all
(11:39):
it can be a form of protest of you know, capitalism,
of of urban blight. That that kind of thing, the
city won't take care of itself, so we will, right exactly. Um.
And also of like food costs, that can be a
protest of that, right. Um. And actually there's this guy
in I believe Boulder, Colorado this past summer's name was
(12:01):
Scott Hoffenburg, and he got slept with the two thousand
dollar a day fine for guerrilla gardening. Really, and the
reason he was doing it, he said, was because food
prices had gotten out of hand. So he in a
neighbor took up this little right away, you know, the
little strips in between the sidewalk in the street. They
just planted a bunch of cucumbers and tomatoes and squash
(12:21):
and all this kind of thing. And um that some
some one of those people with rules and procedures, you know,
called the co enforcement. So luckily the county said they're
going to try to work with the guy. And I
never I didn't hear what happened, but I have a
feeling that if you're a guerrilla gardener and you're gardening
actually right out front of your house and they're threatening
(12:44):
a two thousand dollar fine, that would probably go a
long way to get you to comply. With those rules
and procedures. Yeah, you know, I'd like to pick someone's brain.
He was really against us. Yeah, I want to meet
the person who sees what's going on and goes home
and it's just, yeah, dare they plant those flowers right there? Yeah?
I'm just I'm curious, what's what's happening there? Yeah, And
I don't think I could explain it. But I know
(13:04):
for a fact that I've met people like that before.
It's always a little unsettling. These are probably the same
people that are the neighborhood associations that just flip out
when someone's mailbox looks different than the rest. And yeah,
those those people are a lot of fun. I used
to have a friend who lived in my subdivision. His
family routinely got um letters from the neighborhood association to
you know, move the water skis out from in front
(13:25):
of the garage and that kind of thing. It's crazy.
It was weird. Um so but okay, so Chuck. Both
of us have expressed an interest in guerilla gardening. Let's
say somebody who's listening to us, you know, wants to
get started. Not everybody's against this. And actually, from what
I understand. Um, local nurseries have a tendency to really
kind of support this kind of thing. Yeah, they have
(13:48):
dead plants nobody's gonna buy anyway that may or may
not come back to life. Why not? So what what
should what should people look for when they're doing this?
But I just want to point out this very nice
imperson impersonation but have tol you just like to help me? Yeah,
I wish people could have seen that. Um. Well, first
thing you want to do is find out, you know,
identify your location of where you want to do this.
So look for, like you said, sometimes the little strips
(14:11):
of land between the street and the sidewalk that are
full of trash or grown over with weeds. Those are
good spots corners that have those. And then you want to,
uh find out what kind of plants you want. Uh,
indigenous species are good, non invasive, non invasive. You don't
want to like plant the new cud zoo or anything. Right,
which for you non Southerners is a very fast growing
(14:32):
week just that just takes over absolutely everything. Right, It
can kill an eight foot oak tree in a year
or two, right, Thank you Japan for that exactly. Uh. So, yeah,
you want to pick out the right plants, and you also,
I mean you're you're gonna be It's not like you
just plant this and then you just leave forever. I mean,
if you really want to do it right, you want
to upkeep it. So if you don't have a ton
of time, you want to pick some plants that require
(14:54):
as little upkeep as possible. Yeah, like drought resistant plants,
because the law of comments everybody he wants to take
as much out of this common pool and put as
little back as possible, well as far as economists would say.
Um so yeah, so if you have drought resistant plants,
you can, you know, leave it up to the universe
to take care of it. I hate that ad I know.
(15:15):
Uh so, uh yeah, you've got your plants, you've eat.
When you need to get your plants, you can ask
for donations, or you can buy him yourself if you've
got a extra cash, gather up a little team, or
if you just want to do it yourself, if it's
doable by yourself, and then you know, you go out.
A lot of people do it at night. Um here
in Atlanta, I think in my neighborhood, I could go
out in the middle of the day and no one
would do totally no same here, I think as well,
(15:37):
and there's plenty of lots around my house that I
could get to experise it. Let's do that. Well, maybe
we should, all right, and if any of you out
there interested in getting into guerrilla gardening, uh, we would
suggest checking out guerrilla Gardening dot org Richard Renald site.
He also has a book um based on the advice
of Chairman Mao and Shay Gavara, but about guerrilla gardening
(15:59):
in a of course, you would also be interested in
visiting our humble website. You can type in guerrilla gardening
in the search bar and how Stuff Works dot com
and Chuck, what do you have for us? Do we
have any listener mail? Yep, we have some listener mail.
Listener mail time. So this letter, Josh comes to us
from a lady named Leah Johnson, and uh, Leah says,
(16:22):
I liked your how Echo Anxiety Works article, and I
also liked how you mentioned the vulture vomit at the end. Oh, yes,
this is a good letter. I have, in fact been
puked on by a Turkey vulture and it was disgusting.
I was part of a raptor rehabilitation program, and we
had outdoor housing for them, which we cleaned out once
a week. Every time I went to get the turkey
vulture out so we could clean it out, or just
(16:43):
to give him some time outside, he'd panic and puke
all over the over the place, including on me. Unfortunately,
I always had on gloves when handling the bird, so
the acidity wasn't so much a problem as a terrible
smell from the bird of prey diet we were feeding him. Anyway.
Thanks for making my days better if I give me
something interesting to listen to, and YadA, YadA, YadA, we
love you. That's great. Well, Leah, because you send in
(17:07):
your listener email and uh, because of your selfless care
of birds of prey, we're gonna send you our set
of how stuff Work steak knives are you and yours?
We hope you enjoy them. And if anything else anyone
else out there wants to send us an email, you
can send it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works
(17:27):
dot com. Send it for more on this and thousands
of other topics. Because at how stuff works dot com.
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